Ancient Africa

Kush was a Nile kingdom that shadowed Egypt for two and a half millennia: first from Kerma, then from Napata, and finally from Meroë far to the south. Its defining political moment came in the eighth century BC, when the Kushite king Piye moved north and conquered Egypt outright, founding the Twenty-Fifth Dynasty and ruling as pharaoh.

The Kushite pharaohs did not govern as foreign occupiers. They restored temples, revived Old Kingdom artistic conventions, and presented themselves as more properly Egyptian than the Egyptians. It was an archaising programme, run by rulers who claimed to be rescuing a tradition its own people had let slide. They held Egypt for roughly seventy years before Assyrian invasion pushed them back south.

Meroitic kingship afterwards developed its own character, and its most distinctive feature was that royal women held formal power. The kandake, the title Greek and Roman writers rendered as Candace and mistook for a personal name, ruled in their own right, are depicted on temple reliefs at the same scale as kings, and one led the resistance against a Roman invasion under Augustus.

Aksum, in the Ethiopian highlands from the first century AD, was a different kind of state. It was a highland power that controlled the Red Sea trade through its port at Adulis, governed by a king of kings over subordinate rulers, and at times its reach extended across the sea into southern Arabia.

Kushite military reputation rested on archery. Egyptian texts called the region Ta-Seti, the Land of the Bow, for two thousand years. The relationship between the two Nile powers swung between Egyptian occupation of Nubia and Kushite conquest of Egypt, with the fortresses of the Middle Kingdom marking one phase and the Twenty-Fifth Dynasty the other.

The most instructive military episode is with Rome. After the Roman annexation of Egypt, Kushite forces raided the new province and toppled statues of Augustus. A Roman punitive expedition under Petronius pushed south and sacked Napata. No conquest followed. Kush negotiated a treaty on favourable terms, agreed with Augustus personally.

One artefact from that conflict says more than the narrative. A bronze head of Augustus, hacked from a statue, was buried beneath the threshold of a Meroitic temple so that everyone entering would tread on the emperor’s face. It is now in the British Museum, and few objects anywhere in the Archives say as much.

Aksumite military power was directed across the Red Sea. In the sixth century Kaleb of Aksum invaded Himyar in southern Arabia, reportedly in response to the persecution of Christians there, and held it as a dependency. An African empire was projecting force into Arabia within a century of the rise of Islam.

Kush’s wealth came from position and from resources. It controlled the Nile corridor south of Egypt and with it the trade in gold, ivory, ebony, incense, exotic animals and enslaved people moving north, and the Egyptian word for gold, nub, is often said to be the origin of the name Nubia, though the derivation is not secure.

Meroë added iron. The city sat in a region with ore and with acacia woodland for charcoal, and the slag heaps around it are large enough that an earlier generation of scholars called it the Birmingham of Africa. That overstates it, but iron production there was substantial and supplied both farming and armies.

Aksum’s economy was built on the Red Sea. Its port at Adulis was the outlet for the ivory, gold and tortoiseshell of the interior, and the first-century Periplus of the Erythraean Sea describes it as a working international port with a named ruler who was literate in Greek.

The clearest measure of Aksum’s place in that world is its coinage. From the third century Aksum minted in gold, silver and bronze, on weight standards aligned to international trade, with legends in Greek for use abroad and Ge’ez for use at home, and it was the only sub-Saharan African state of its era to do so. Coins struck to international standards mean a monetised economy plugged directly into Mediterranean and Indian markets.

Nubian society is known largely through its cemeteries, which are extensive and have been excavated for over a century. Burial practice tracks the shifting relationship with Egypt. Some periods have Egyptian-style coffins and shabtis, others distinctively Nubian bed burials and tumuli, and the alternation is a good measure of how much cultural independence was being asserted at any moment.

The prominence of royal women in Kush is not confined to the ruling kandake. Queen mothers held defined roles, succession sometimes ran through the maternal line, and women appear in monumental art in postures of authority that Egyptian convention reserved for kings.

Aksumite society was highland and agricultural, terraced and ploughed, supporting a population large enough to fund monumental building and a standing military capacity. Its towns were stone-built with elite mansions on podia, and the material culture shows imported goods from the Mediterranean, India and Arabia in ordinary contexts.

Both civilisations were multilingual as a matter of course. Aksumite inscriptions appear in Ge’ez, Greek and Sabaic on the same monument, and Meroitic administration ran in Meroitic while keeping Egyptian for some ceremonial purposes.

Kushite religion began deeply entangled with Egypt’s. Amun was the state god, worshipped at Jebel Barkal, a distinctive flat-topped mountain the Kushites identified as a birthplace of the god and the Egyptians had regarded as sacred before them. Kushite kings were legitimated by Amun’s oracle.

As Meroë asserted itself the religion diverged. Apedemak, a lion-headed warrior god with no Egyptian counterpart, became a major deity with his own temples, and the Meroitic pantheon developed as a distinct system with Egyptian elements rather than as a provincial version of Egyptian religion.

Aksum’s religious history turns on a single decision. In the fourth century King Ezana converted to Christianity. His own inscriptions show it, shifting from the traditional gods to the Lord of Heaven, and so does his coinage, which replaces the disc and crescent with the cross. Aksum was among the earliest states anywhere to adopt Christianity officially, at roughly the same time as Rome.

That decision produced an unbroken tradition. The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church has continued from Ezana to the present, with its own canon, its own liturgical language in Ge’ez, and a monastic and manuscript culture that preserved texts lost elsewhere, including the Book of Enoch, which survives complete only in Ge’ez.

Nubia has more pyramids than Egypt, several hundred of them, at El-Kurru, Nuri and above all the royal cemeteries at Meroë, where they stand in dense fields. They are a form of their own. They are much smaller than the Egyptian pyramids and far steeper, built over chambers cut below rather than within, and most date from a time when Egypt had stopped building pyramids centuries before.

Their condition is a modern story. In the 1830s an Italian treasure hunter, Giuseppe Ferlini, demolished the tops of dozens of Meroitic pyramids searching for gold. He found some, in one of them, which encouraged him to continue. The characteristic flat-topped silhouette of the Meroë pyramids today is largely his work.

Aksum raised some of the largest single stones erected anywhere in the ancient world. The stelae are carved to look like multi-storey buildings, complete with false doors, rows of windows and beam-ends, and were raised over elite tombs in the third and fourth centuries. The greatest, over thirty-three metres and around five hundred tonnes, fell and shattered as it was being raised, an attempt at something right at the limit of what was possible.

One of them has a modern history that has become part of its meaning. The second-largest stele was cut apart and taken to Rome on Mussolini’s orders in 1937 as a trophy of the Ethiopian occupation, kept there despite a 1947 treaty obligation, and finally returned and re-erected at Aksum between 2005 and 2008. Its ancient argument was about Aksumite kingship. Its modern one is about restitution.

Kush produced the first indigenous writing system of sub-Saharan Africa. Having used Egyptian hieroglyphs for centuries, Meroë developed its own script around the second century BC. It came in two forms, a monumental hieroglyphic and a cursive for everyday use, with about twenty-three signs working as an alphasyllabary and a helpful word-divider.

Its creation was a political act. Meroitic hieroglyphic borrows Egyptian signs and assigns them entirely new sound values, so the script looks Egyptian at a glance and says something else completely. A state that builds its own writing system to stop writing in its neighbour’s language is making a statement about independence.

The result is a strange one. The Egyptologist Francis Llewellyn Griffith worked out the sign values between 1909 and 1911 using royal names known from Egyptian sources, so Meroitic can be pronounced. For most of the following century it could not be understood, because the language had no identified relatives and no long bilingual text. An entire literate civilisation could be read aloud and not understood.

The most important advance came from the French linguist Claude Rilly, who has argued, persuasively for most specialists, that Meroitic belongs to the Northern East Sudanic branch of Nilo-Saharan, related to Nubian, Nara and Taman. That supplied at last the comparative leverage that Coptic gave Egyptian and Greek gave Linear B. The language is now partly understood, well beyond the funerary formulae and well short of free reading, and the way in came through languages people still speak.

Both civilisations are known through a mixture of their own inscriptions, their neighbours’ accounts, and archaeology, with the balance tilted heavily toward archaeology because the internal written record is either unreadable, as with Meroitic, or largely lost, as with Aksum.

External accounts have to be handled with care. Egyptian sources on Nubia are the record of a power that alternately occupied and was conquered by it, and their conventions of depicting Nubians shift with the political relationship. Greek and Roman writers on both regions traded in the exotic. The Kebra Nagast, the Ethiopian national epic deriving the dynasty from Solomon and Sheba, is a medieval text making a claim about legitimacy rather than a record of Aksumite history.

The historiography carries a specific burden. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century European scholarship approached both civilisations assuming that achievement in Africa needed an outside explanation, so Kush became a provincial imitation of Egypt and Aksum an Arabian colony. That framework shaped what was excavated, published and believed for generations, and taking it apart is recent and unfinished work.

What has changed the picture is fieldwork. Excavation across Sudan, much of it accelerated by dam-related rescue archaeology, and continuing work in Ethiopia and Eritrea, have established both civilisations on their own terms. This is a field where the evidence base is still growing rapidly and where confident older statements should be checked against recent work.